Grand River Conservation Authority meets with residents following West Montrose flood
GRCA and Woolwich Township review response to June incident.
The Grand River Conservation Authority is listening to community concerns, and is looking at new ways to improve the flood warning system after severe flooding in West Montrose last month.
- Before and after: Grand River recedes from dramatic weekend rise
- Flooding in Elora, West Montrose, New Hamburg after 100mm rainfall
- Lessons learned from Grand River floods discussed Thursday in Woolwich
West Montrose reached a peak of 507.14 cubic metres per second late on July 23, according to the GRCA. That's a hundred times higher than the normal summer low flow, which is 5 cubic metres per second. In the historic 1974 flood, flows at West Montrose reached 670 m3/s.
At a public meeting Monday night with the GRCA and the Township of Woolwich, many residents said they are not satisfied with the way the GRCA handled the June incident, and felt it could have been avoided.
"I think the system has some failures in it and they don't manage the dams as well as they could," Tony Dowling, a resident, told The Morning Edition's Craig Norris.
Didn't know 'until it was too late'
According to Dowling, the GRCA did not do enough to ensure there was adequate reservoir storage to mitigate an incident like this one.
But creating storage space for rain water is not that simple, says Dwight Boyd, director of engineering for the GRCA.
"The reservoirs are there to reduce flooding, but also to add water to the river during low-flow periods," he said.
He says the GRCA was in line with operating policy that stipulates how much of the reservoirs should be made available for flood storage and how much should be kept for feeding the Grand River.
The other major concern for residents was communication during and after the flood.
"We didn't find out that it was probably going to be a dangerous level of water until it was far too late," Dowling said.